Our teams continue to work hard developing Spirit of Steam, and we have some exciting footage showing the progress that is being made. Executive Producer Matt Peddlesden will be joining us on the stream this week and discussing how the development is coming along.

The video below highlights improvements that have been made to our motion blur effect. As a lot of people will already be familiar, motion blur is less than ideal the way it currently works. Because of this, some people prefer to turn it off entirely while others turn it on and promise not to look at the wheels.

This is sometimes tolerable for the small wheels of modern trains, however it’s impossible to ignore on steam locomotives with their huge wheels. With this in mind the team started looking at options to try and resolve the issue.

With Motion Blur enabled while the majority of the scene looks much better and gives a fantastic impression of speed and motion, however there are significant issues with the way wheels are rendered to where the blur extends beyond the wheels spoiling the effect.

The underlying reason for this is that by default, Motion Blur is "linear" so it's assuming everything is moving in a line and not in a circle. In later versions of Unreal there is a simple "Radial Motion Blur" effect that can be added however when we tried to use this, it seems to work best with car wheels and not at all well with the large open spoked steam wheel.

Our team spent some more time working on this and have been able to create a new Unreal material which performs various technicalities combining its own processing on top of the radial motion blur to allow us to resolve the issue really nicely.

While this works well on the wheels on the steam locomotive, we are also now looking at how we can employ this technique on all wheels going forwards!

While we wait for Spirit of Steam, you can look forward to Harlem Line: Grand Central Terminal – North White Plains, which will be available soon!

We spoke to our development team about one of the areas they have spent some extra time on with Harlem, and this is adding snow and rust on the tracks.

In the first couple of images, you can see what an earlier route (Tharandter Rampe) looks like in the way it renders junctions. Key areas to look at are the sudden change to the rust track on the frog and then in the winter, these areas remain uncovered in snow.

The second set of images are from Harlem. There's now a smooth blend to the rust on the frogs, and in the winter rusted tracks (not just frogs but all rusted tracks, including disused sidings etc.) will now get a covering of snow to make them more clearly separate from the main tracks. You will also see that in the Harlem shots, the chairs the rails sit on now have snow, as do the base of the rails themselves.

There are numerous other small changes and details that our infrastructure team have worked hard on paying extra attention to detail, such as the type and position of the 3rd rail and so forth.

The response to Creators Club Beta has been staggering, with over 285,000 subscriptions to mods from the community! Since its launch you have also uploaded a total of 3,665 mods, 2,884 of which are liveries, 781 are scenarios.

The individual user subscribed to the most mods is currently subbed to 796 and the most creations uploaded by any one individual is 51.

We have had immense joy looking at what you’ve all been able to create so far and thanks to the outstanding quality of liveries you have been designing, we are pleased to share that Avanti are now on our list of approved brands you can share on the Creators Club Beta.

In addition, you can also look forward to our approved list of Brand logos being added to the Livery Designer as decals in the coming weeks.

This week there has been some significant movement in the order we expect Preservation Crew updates to be released. We spoke to Adam about this anticipated movement in our previous Roadmap. Some items such as Peninsula Corridor have been moved further down the list as after testing, they have shown they need more work. You can see the current projected order of releases in the roadmap section - these are subject to change, but our aim is to surface these all to you by the end of the summer while looking to group releases in pairs, where possible.

Looking forward to Luzern - Sursee developed by Rivet Games? Keep up to date with their devblog videos here.

SBB RABe 523 Devblog 3D | Part 1

SBB RABe 523 Devblog Technical Setup | Part 2

SBB RABe 523 Timelapse Build

Finally, we are continuing to make additional changes to the Roadmap so that we are able to provide you with more valuable information.

We won’t be removing anything from the current format, in fact, we will be adding more. You will still be able track the movement of items that get added and taken off and we will also be continuing our streams that coincide with a Roadmap update.

This will be the last fortnightly Roadmap and going forward they will be changing to a monthly update. We intend to provide the community with a more in depth look into the development of our projects, as we have started to do with this Roadmap article. In order to do so, we will be using this extra time to gather information from our development teams and gathering more exciting content for you, such as interviews, videos, screenshots, and more.

These are forthcoming add-ons that are being developed by Dovetail Games. Where details are still being finalised for a release we are including the ID code for it when possible. This will give you a good idea of what to expect. To see what these ID codes mean you can refer to this post

These are forthcoming add-ons that are being developed by teams outside Dovetail Games. Where details are still being finalised for a release we are including the ID code for it when possible. This will give you a good idea of what to expect. To see what these ID codes mean you can refer to this post

Core features are larger projects. These may be significant new pieces of functionality or changes that will affect players on one or several different platforms. Often requiring more time in development this list may move more slowly than others.

Projects that players will notice but don’t fall into one of the other categories.

• Dovetail Live rewards

Projects that are being tackled by the Preservation Crew. Many of these upgrades will simply be adding the latest game functionality to an older route. The additions or changes in the “upgrade” will include some or all of the following: station departure boards, animated crossings, platform climb-up functionality, improved track rendering, Rush Hour passenger density and appearance, support for RailDriver, contact signaller functionality, minor fixes to scenery, minor fixes to audio, minor fixes to gameplay, minor fixes to menu items, Livery Designer compatibility and Scenario Planner expansion.

Items that have been removed from the Roadmap. This is either because they have been completed, their status having changed or the project having been suspended.

Join us today, Tuesday March 8th at 20:00 UTC, on Twitch or YouTube where members of the team will be discussing the latest Roadmap and answering your questions. You can also find all our release previews over on YouTube.